Some of my earliest memories are of watching Sesame Street. I distinctly remember one instance where I was sitting in front of the television, not feeling particularly interested in the show, but being unable to stop watching.
Sesame Street.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.
Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh.
Did anyone watch Nightline tonight? The interviewed Elmo’s “voice” and it made me squeal like a little girl. 
You mean the performer of Elmo. Kevin Clash is a muppeteer, which is so much more than just a voice.
Yeah, Lefty was one shady dude, gave me the creeps when I was a kid, I just knew he was up to no good.
His interview on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me was HILARIOUS. And his voice is so not what you’d expect.
Remember the extended closing, when they showed all the credits over the video of the kids playing with Barkley in the park? There’s one bit where, thanks to the magic of split-screen, all the kids run behind the same tree. Barkley comes over, looks for the kids, paws at the tree and runs off, then all the kids come running out from behind the tree the other way.
As a kid I had all these elaborate ideas for how this was happening. The one that made the most sense was that the tree was hollow and had a big ladder on the inside. All the kids climbed up inside and shut a disguised door before Barkley could see.
As with many things regarding childhood, reality is less interesting.
While we’re on the subject, I’ve looked for years for a clean copy of the Toots Thielemans harmonica song that closes the show. You can find the opening theme many places, but never the closing theme. Best you can do is YouTube clips with talking over them.
Does anyone know where I can find the original space age-style theme? They played a bit of it on NPR yesterday.
My family still does this whenever we want to say “yes” to something. Or if it is a string of “yesses” we will just “yup yup yup yup” all of the time.
Yes!!!
How did you find it? I’ve been looking for it on YouTube for months.
Aw, shucks, I just typed in “guess who i met” and “sesame street”.
And that’s that.
So Google / YouTube hate me, is what you’re saying…
I think I searched for “I met you today”, which came up empty. Thank you again!
You people are crazy! This show, which my kindergarten teacher told us to watch, was horribly traumatic. To display the letter W they had Wanda the Witch wash her wig on Wednesday, only to have it whipped away by the wind. Normally her dog would have fetched it for her, but since it was W day she didn’t have a dog, she had a weasel. Weasels don’t fetch unless there’s a chicken coop involved–I don’t know how I figured that out at age five seeing as I had never laid eyes on a weasel and it would be a good 37 years till I did–but I felt very sorry for Wanda and developed a severe obsession with weasels that persists to this day. Thank you, Sesame Street.
One really funny moment from that clip that I never noticed when I was a kid:
*“Is this short man fat, or is he skinny?”
“Oh, I guess you’d have to say he’s kind of… stout.”
“Fat, huh?”
“Yep.”*
They’d never get away with a joke like that these days.
Prominent memory from childhood: Celia Cruz, “Sun Sun Babaé”
Prominent memory from adulthood: Harvey Fierstein, "Everything’s Coming Up Noses